Ingo Molnar released a new patchset titled the 'Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair Scheduler'. He explained, "this project is a complete rewrite of the Linux task scheduler. My goal is to address various feature requests and to fix deficiencies in the vanilla scheduler that were suggested/found in the past few years, both for desktop scheduling and for server scheduling workloads."

While you won't 'see' this kind of research in a commercial OS, it would be naive to assume it isn't happening. I'd be very surprised if Microsoft and everybody else didn't have teams constantly ripping their OS kernels apart and trying all kind of weird and wonderful things.

Just because most of these things end up not being implemented in a commercial product, doesn't mean they haven't been tried and tested.